The Russians Are Coming

The Cold War was a military contest, a fight to secure economic markets, a race for scientific breakthroughs—and it was an athletic competition. Every four years, the Olympic Games provided an arena where American and Soviet athletes could meet and wage a battle for international supremacy. “The Russians are Coming” is the story of hotly contested medal counts, secret political defections, how heroes are made, and why you did the standing broad jump in elementary school.

Bibliography:

Susan Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sports (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1994).

David Goldblatt, The Games: A Global History of the Olympic Games (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2016).*

Allen Guttmann, The Games Must Go On: Avery Brundage and the Olympic Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).

Toby Rider, Cold War Games: Propaganda, the Olympics, and U.S. Foreign Policy (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2017).

* Special mention to David Goldblatt and his line about getting “tased from a drone”...so good I had to steal it!